Do inspirational quotes work?

Inspirational quotes are all over social media – but do they actually work in pushing up engagement and interactions?

In the social media world, content is king – which means engagement is queen… because if nobody is reading and acting on your content then you’re wasting your time and money.

What is Engagement Rate?

Twitter monitors who does what to your tweets. They know how many people like your tweets, retweet them, and reply to you. Divide this into the number of impressions (the number of people who have seen your message) and you have the engagement rate, expressed as a percentage.

What is a good Engagement Rate?

Often the bigger your account, the lower your engagement rate. When Katy Perry’s rate was measured she had 98 million followers and an engagement rate of 0.02%; Justin Bieber, 94m followers had 0.17%. Barack Obama, with 88m followers managed an impressive 0.7%.

On a rule of thumb, anything over 1% is doing pretty good.

Improving your Engagement Rate

It’s no good just having great content, it has got to generate engagement from your audience. So when we came across a product which says it will increase engagement by delivering interesting posts your audience will engage with, and there’s a free trial, it made sense to give it a go.

Finding Inspiration?

Personally, I don’t like the motivational quote thing – I find them banal, bland, and actually quite uninspiring, but I can see why they ought to work. Pretty pictures and ‘meaningful’ words get likes on Twitter, after all!

The quotes service we found had automated delivery and was offering a free trial month with two tweets every day. Part of the set up included personalising the choice of quotes and images.

We chose to run this on a mature account with high follower levels but falling engagement rates. We chose those aspects on the set-up which most closely mirrored the character of the account, and designed to appeal most closely to their existing followers. We clicked the Go button, and sat back to watch engagement grow…

The Delivery

Except it didn’t. We tested it for just under a month in October, with a total of 57 inspirational quotes posted. In previous months, engagement rate was averaging just over 1% – in October, it was 0.8%. Studying the engagement rate on the inspirational quotes showed that the rate on those posts was only 0.47%. In actual terms then, the inspirational quotes reduced the overall engagement rate on the account. Reach was impacted negatively as well, although not by such a high degree.

It’s possible that using inspirational quotes will work well on some types of accounts but it didn’t work on this trial. We concluded that we will keep writing our original content because it works better.

What’s your experience – have you used a quotes service on your account?